Let’s get the introductions out of the way. I’m the food director at Bon Appétit, which technically means I have final say over every recipe we print in the magazine and online, but that doesn’t mean I’m the best cook in the kitchen. And when it comes to baking, I’m good, but I’m not “Claire Saffitz Good.” This is a woman who makes puff pastry from scratch and does things with sourdough starter that I will never understand. But when she swore up and down that this upside down cake was really really easy and impossible to mess up, I believed her, because Claire Saffitz is not a liar. And I can now vouch for this recipe 100% and affirm that it’s easy enough for a child to make.

The first thing I like to do when baking—even before I preheat the oven—is measure out all the ingredients so that I can cook straight through once everything is good to go. This also ensures I have all the ingredients I need, because nothing sucks more than discovering you don’t have enough sugar when you get to the part of the recipe when you’re supposed to add the sugar. I recommend you do the same, and since this recipe calls for room temperature eggs, put them in a bowl and cover them with hot tap water while you get organized. At the same time, melt the butter since you need it to coat the pan before anything else can happen.

Photo by Alex Lau

The other extra little step you need to take is to cut a parchment paper round that will fit in the bottom of your pan—you can’t skip this step, because it is the insurance that keeps the fruit from sticking, and a pretty un-stuck crown of cherries is essential to your success.

Photo by Alex Lau

There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to set the pan on the parchment, trace around the perimeter, and cut the circle out. Don’t use wax paper! The coating will melt in the oven and ruin everything.

Photo by Alex Lau

Photo by Alex Lau

Photo by Alex Lau

Next up: dump the 2 10-ounce bags frozen cherries (or blueberries!) into a bowl and add the 2 Tbsp. sugar and 2 Tbsp. whichever citrus juice you’re going with. I didn’t have lemons, so I used limes, which made me feel like I was making a cherry-lime rickey cake and I enjoyed that. Once the 2 Tbsp. melted butter goes in, the mixture will go from being dark and shiny to being matte and clumpy, because the frozen cherries cool the butter down immediately. I’ve been assured this doesn’t matter. Proceed.

Photo by Alex Lau

Now the cherries go into the oven to soften and for the juices to concentrate. If you hadn’t already measured the rest of the ingredients, now would be a good time. It’s also a great time to tidy up anything you’ve used so far, put the bags of flour and sugar away and look at your phone 7,000 more times. As every professional chef and every human with a small kitchen will tell you, it pays to clean as you go.

Photo by Alex Lau

Your powers of deduction will be needed at the 40-minute mark, which is when you have to decide if the cherry juices are adequately thickened. The reason this matters is that if the fruit is too juicy, the cake will be soggy on top. If you over-reduce the liquid, the cherry topping will get sticky as it bakes and could possibly even burn. Take a look and ask yourself if the juices look syrupy, less like juice and more like the texture of thin honey or maple syrup. The fruit shouldn’t be shriveled, but you should be able to see that the liquid has reduced somewhat, because there will be a cherry ring a little higher up the sides of the pan. In my oven, this didn’t happen until the top end of the 40–50 minute range, so don’t stress out if yours takes longer, too.

Photo by Alex Lau

Once the pan of glazy-looking cherries is out of the oven, you can go ahead and make the batter. I used my hands to carve out a well in the center of the dry ingredients (2 cups all-purpose flour, ½ tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking powder, ¼ tsp. baking soda, and 1 cup sugar) and once the wet ingredients were in there (3 eggs, 1 cup sour cream, 2 tsp. zest, and 5 Tbsp. melted butter), I whisked them to break up the eggs before going whole hog on the rest of the ingredients.

Photo by Alex Lau

This batter is gorgeous—nice and yellow, shiny, thick, and smooth. I licked the batter off the whisk, just to make sure it tasted good. It tasted very good. Everyone else was watching TV, so I felt no guilt about not giving the whisk to one of my children.

Photo by Alex Lau

Photo by Alex Lau

I’ll admit being slightly impatient about waiting for the cherries to cool completely before dolloping the batter. The pan was still warm, no question. But it was fine: some of the fruit juices pushed up and seeped into the top of the batter, which made absolutely no difference in the finished cake. Smoothing the top with a spatula introduced another opportunity to lick batter.

Photo by Alex Lau

My cake took a little longer than 55 minutes to bake through, which is brings up a crucial point: You should always trust the visual cues in a recipe over the times given. Every oven is different, every pan conducts heat its own way, and a cake is ready when it’s ready, not necessarily when the timer beeps. If the center of the cake still wobbles, it’s too liquid. This is a fairly tall cake with a pretty thick batter, and it needs time to cook all the way through. You know what sucks? Unmolding a cake and having it sink in the center because it’s liquid goo in there.

Photo by Alex Lau

Next patience-testing moment comes when the cake is out of the oven, but still too hot to unmold. This takes 10 minutes. Don’t let it go too long, because you want the cherry juices to still be warm (things get harder and stickier as they cool). In my barely-contained excitement, I neglected to read the part of the recipe where it says to cut around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan. Turned out fine for me, BUT I would do this if I were you!

Alex Lau

If your cake does not immediately slip out of the pan onto the cooling rack, give the bottom of the pan a couple of taps, or gently pull the pan up and see if it starts to release. But whatever you do, don’t go inverting it back and forth and back again. You’ll end up with molten fruit juices running up your shirt sleeves and a mess of a cake.

Photo by Alex Lau

Peeling the parchment paper off the cherries reminded me of that moment when you get a new phone and take it out of the box, and it’s got that protective plastic film on the screen that you get to lift away to reveal your perfect, unscratched phone. Aaaahhhhhhhh. Prepare to be flooded with a warm, satisfied feeling when you see your ruby-jewel prize of a cake. If your cherries have gone askew, just nudge them back into any bare spots and carry on. And if your cake doesn’t look like you thought it would, don’t apologize and don’t throw your kitchen towel down in a mix of self-deprecation, frustration, and anger. Like a world-famous literary marvel with a tattered cover, it’s what’s inside that counts. You can also camouflage any imperfections under a forgiving mountain of whipped sour cream...